Trust (and its corollary mistrust) lies at the heart of contemporary debates regarding governance and democracy. There is an extensive literature focused on conceptualising trust, and more specifically political trust, and exploring the potential consequences of the perceived decline or erosion in the latter for democracy (Cook 2001; Rothstein and Uslaner 2005; Torcal and Montero 2006; van Deth et al 2007). Problems of democratic deficit, of the misfit between politics and policy, of political corruption apparently undermine trust in politicians and underpin the emergence in most EU polities of forms of national Populist Party responses (Schmidt 2006). There is a strong and growing demand for more diverse and effective forms of citizen and civil society engagement to increase levels of trust and engage an increasingly diverse, busy and complex urban population; hence the linkage between trust and concepts like co-production and co-creation (Fledderus 2015).

The chapter addresses the related themes of trust and mistrust, coproduction or co-creation and democratic confidence. It draws on comparative analysis drawn from the UK, France and Germany as part of the WISERD ‘Building Trust? Institutions and interactions of multi-level governance in the UK, Germany and France’ project. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section provides a brief overview of debates around the conceptualisation of trust and, in particular, the forms of ‘political trust’ that are frequently utilised in debates around the crisis of democracy. The second section analyses contemporary arguments around the decline of trust in the three countries included in the project. This analysis draws on a range of data sources, including the 2016 YouGov survey carried out as part of the project. The final section examines the shape and role of civil society actors within the three different national contexts in relation to wider debates around trust in government.

The existential threat to democracy and democratic institutions presented by the decline in political trust has become a well-worn path ventured down by politicians, journalists and academics in recent decades (Lenard 2005; van der Meer 2017).

For a long time German public opinion displayed high rates of trust in Chancellor Angela Merkel and her CDU party, as well as the federal government. In recent years, however, there have been signs of a general decline in trust, though the evidence in Germany is much less conclusive than in the UK or France. This chapter provides data to support the existence of a solid foundation of political trust in Germany at all territorial levels of the political system. At the same time, the data (whether that of private enterprises, like the Edelman Trust Barometer, or public institutions, such as Eurobarometer) casts doubt on the enduring features of trust in the national government, the parliament or political institutions in general. The chapter overviews national trends of trust and transparency in Germany. It then offers a closer comparison in the two distinct Länder of Hesse and Saxony Anhalt. Hesse is an affluent, dynamic land with a rising population, and is home to the dynamic metropolis Frankfurt, as well as a vibrant business community and associative life. Saxony-Anhalt, on the other hand, is economically stagnant with a shrinking population and problems of multicultural community integration.

The chapter follows a similar comparative logic to that undertaken in France and the UK. In the case of Germany, the trust– transparency nexus is understood mainly in terms of political accountability, administrative transparency, party politics, policy issues regarding trust and transparency in the two Länder and the operation of civil society. These themes cut across commonalities and divergent aspects of Hesse and Saxony Anhalt. All these themes tie into the nexus between trust and transparency. Parties and actors that are accountable to civil society and political institutions play an important role for the production and deterioration of trust. The chapter concludes by situating the German case in relation to the trust– transparency matrix.

Exploring trust and transparency in Germany

In order to interpret secondary data on trust and transparency in Germany, it is necessary to situate this discussion within the dominant national intellectual and methodological traditions that have shaped the discourse around these concepts. In the prevalent German political sociology tradition, ‘institutional trust’, defined as the trust of citizens in institutions, is generally quantitatively oriented.

One of the central themes of Boris Johnson's speech on the morning of 13 December 2019, following his party's landslide election victory, was trust, and specifically the trust placed in his government by voters who had previously never voted for the Conservative Party. Despite Brexit's almost all-encompassing domination of the political agenda in recent years, the decline of political trust in the UK can be characterised as representing a longer-term phenomenon (Whiteley et al, 2016). It has been portrayed by the BBC's political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, as the latest in a long line of events over the past 20 years that have ‘shattered’ public trust in politics, from the Iraq War in 2003 to the high-profile MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009 via the financial crisis in 2007– 8 (Kuenssberg, 2020). Furthermore, Brexit has been supplanted from the political agenda – even if only temporarily – by the COVID-19 pandemic, and once again the narrative around the decline of trust has come to the fore. Although Jennings (2020) noted an initial ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect of the crisis, trust has steadily been eroded. The question of transparency has had a lower profile in terms of both academic and public debate. The primary focus around questions of transparency in the UK context have been the measures introduced in the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which came into force in January 2000 (Worthy and Hazell, 2017). As explored in Chapters 1 and 2, exploring transparency and its interaction with trust requires a nuanced analysis which moves beyond formal mechanisms and methodological nationalism.

This chapter applies the trust– transparency matrix outlined in Chapter 2 on different levels of the trust– transparency nexus in the UK case – exploring political trust at the UK and the subnational levels, and finally the trust–transparency dynamics within and between civil society at the subnational level. The chapter develops a comparative analysis of North West England, centred on the Greater Manchester City Region and Liverpool City Region, and Wales. It draws on a wide range of secondary sources including existing published research and survey data, policy documents and 39 semi-structured interviews carried out between 2017 and 2018. The chapter is divided into four core sections. The first section explores ‘thin’ conceptions of political trust and transparency in the UK context, primarily drawing on public attitude surveys.

Trust is perhaps one of the most contested and nebulous concepts within contemporary academic research. Grimmelikhuijsen and colleagues (2013: 577) note that ‘across and even within disciplines, a myriad of definitions, concepts, and operationalizations are being used in research’ and therefore providing clarity in terms of what we mean and understand when discussing trust is itself challenging. Levi (1998: 79, quoted in Newton 2007: 343), for example, noted that trust ‘is not one thing and it does not have one source; it has a variety of forms and causes’. Any academic journal article, monograph or edited volume which directly or indirectly engages with questions of trust is relatively incomplete without a section or chapter devoted to what we mean by trust. Rousseau and colleagues (1998: 394), for example, tackled this challenge head-on in their attempt to develop a multidisciplinary view of trust which provides ‘clear boundaries to usefully inform research and theory’. They settle on a definition where trust is characterised as ‘a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour of another’ (Rousseau et al, 1998: 395). While this parsimonious definition provides a useful starting point for a cross-disciplinary discussion of trust, it does not go very far in terms of understanding the dynamics of building trust and of different dimensions of trust which characterise contemporary governance, such as interpersonal, institutional and interorganisational dynamics (Nooteboom, 1996; Edelenbos and Klijn, 2007; Klijn et al, 2010; Edelenbos and Eshuis, 2012; Fuglsang and Jagd, 2015).

This chapter explores approaches to contemporary debates on the concept of trust. It takes as a starting point that trust can be understood as a complex, multidimensional concept and that context is potentially key (Zmerli and Hooghe, 2011; Grimmelikhuijsen et al, 2013; Meijer, 2013). The chapter is divided into four sections. The first examines contemporary approaches to defining and conceptualising trust. The second explores core assumptions about how trust can be utilised within the context of our multi-level cases. The third section explores how we can understand the dynamics between interpersonal and interorganisational trust. And the fourth engages in a discussion of trust and closely related concepts.

In the previous chapter, trust was defined as much by its linkage with other concepts as by its own inherent properties. This is especially the case with trust and transparency, the core relationship we explore in this book. Rather than straightforward explanations in terms of independent, intermediary and dependent variables, we present trust as a contextually and institutionally contingent phenomenon based on the perceived competence and, to a lesser extent, benevolence and honesty of government and other actors within governance networks. What we label as the trust– transparency matrix presents a general heuristic, which facilitates carrying out cross-national multi-level comparisons of trust and transparency. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first examines contemporary approaches to defining and conceptualising transparency. The second explores the range of existing approaches to studying transparency within contemporary research. The third section examines the trust– transparency nexus, and existing studies designed to explore the link between increased transparency and levels of trust. The final extended section introduces the trust– transparency matrix, drawing on the debates explored in the current and previous chapters, which will be operationalised in the second section of the book.

Conceptualising transparency

Transparency, as Hood (2006: 3) notes, has ‘attained a quasi-religious significance’ over recent decades and this is reflected in the increasingly wide-ranging literature examining this concept, its rise to prominence and its potential consequences (Oliver, 2004; Hood and Heald, 2006; Fung et al, 2007; Bowles et al, 2014; Han, 2015; Schudson, 2015; Taylor and Kelsey, 2016; Fenster, 2017; Alloa and Thomä, 2018; Pozen and Schudson, 2018). Although the broader concept of transparency predates the late twentieth century, much like the concept of trust explored earlier in the book, transparency in the contemporary context is a multifaceted and contested concept that has risen to prominence in the past two decades (Heald, 2006; Mabillard and Pasquier, 2016). Cucciniello and colleagues’ (2017) review of the transparency literature notes that it has been defined and operationalised in a variety of different ways. Similarly, Alloa (2018: 29– 30) identifies ten different aspirations attributed to transparency in different contexts:

• 1. ‘Transparency as accessibility: Ensuring informational access to all citizens and implementing a “right to know.”’

• 2. ‘Transparency as procedural fairness: Safeguarding due process to all parties involved.’

The decline of trust has become a dominant narrative within both the contemporary academic literature and the media. Onora O’Neill (2002: 8), as part of her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures, observed that sociologists and journalists have reported that ‘mistrust and suspicion have spread across all areas of life’ and therefore ‘loss of trust has become a cliché of our times.’ In a September 2018 address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, diagnosed that the world was suffering from a ‘bad case of Trust Deficit Disorder’ and that people's trust in institutions at both the national and international level was at ‘breaking point’ (UN Secretary General, 2018, cited in Jennings et al, 2019). Evidence for the perceived crisis in trust is frequently provided by national and international surveys: for example, the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer (2020) reported a ‘trust paradox’ where strong economic performance was accompanied by a stagnation of trust in key institutions, such as government and the media. Furthermore, the coronavirus pandemic which swept over the world from early 2020 refocused attention on trust – in terms of both the impact of the presence or absence of trust for governmental policy responses and the impact of the pandemic on existing levels of trust (Devine et al, 2021). Indeed, many policy responses to the pandemic were framed within the context of trust. For example, part of the rationale for the Welsh Government using a locally organised ‘Test and Trace’ service rather than the centralised service set up by the United Kingdom (UK) Government was the assumption that people living in Wales were more likely to follow the advice of someone who sounded as if they were familiar with their community.

Even putting the coronavirus pandemic to one side, in European politics a set of unprecedented events have disrupted existing equilibria. In the UK a long-lasting debate about membership of the European Union (EU) finally resulted in Britain's exit from the EU at the end of January 2020. In France public riots around the yellow vests (‘gilets jaunes’) shattered the calm of Macron's second year in office. In Germany the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been elected in almost every state parliament in the country, enduringly establishing a party to the right of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in the political landscape.

This chapter applies the trust– transparency matrix outlined in Chapter 2 to the case of France. It draws on a nationwide survey conducted in October 2016, as well as 38 interviews carried out in the two regions Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Bretagne from 2017 to 2018. The first section provides an overview of the received literature on trust and transparency, while the second presents cross-national survey findings that portray France as, in most cases, a critical case of mistrust. In the third section, we present findings of the nationwide survey conducted by YouGov, while the fourth section drills down into the interviews in the two regions. After a discussion of civil society, the chapter situates France in the overall context of the trust– transparency matrix and concludes by assessing the challenges that lie ahead in terms of rebuilding trust and role of transparency.

Exploring trust and transparency in France

France has often been deemed a low-trust society. Classical American, British and French scholars converged in the traditional reading of a divided French political culture pitting the ‘two Frances’ against each other, afraid of face-to-face contact and hiding behind impersonal rules (Crozier, 1963, 1970; Hoffmann, 1963; Hayward, 1973). Such representations have proved stubbornly persistent. This dyarchic culture has variously been diagnosed in terms of a revolutionary tradition, marked by conflict between church and state, between centre and periphery, between Paris and the provinces (Cole, 2017). Central authority has been contested throughout much of France's 200-plus years of post-revolutionary history. There is an undercurrent of political violence, whereby power is won in Paris. The fulcrum of mistrust occurred in the post-war Fourth Republic, which experienced 28 governments in 12 years of existence before succumbing to the colonial conflict in Algeria (Williams, 1964).

The first decade of the Fifth Republic confounded these prognostics. The founding decades of the Fifth Republic witnessed a restoration of trust in national political institutions; specifically, the institution of the French presidency (Ambler, 1975), after the chaos of the latter years of the Fourth Republic. The French presidency, directly elected since 1965, provided an incarnation of political authority (Andrews and Hoffmann, 1981; Wright, 1989) and still represents the key political office. The political modernisation represented by the Fifth Republic was accompanied by profound changes in French society and economy.

The health of trust – in its various configurations and conceptualisations – and questions as to whether it is in decline, have been a consistent feature of academic research across a wide range of disciplines since the 1960s. Interest has often centred on assessing the impact of specific events or crises on the state of trust, for example, the 2007–8 financial crisis and the rise of populism across the world (Ziller and Schübel, 2015; Algan et al, 2017; Hosking, 2019; Geurkink et al, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic which engulfed the world from early 2020 sparked further interest in trust-related research, as Devine and colleagues (2021: 276) note, in terms of the impact of the presence or absence of trust on government responses to the pandemic, but also the impact of the pandemic itself on trust. A key feature of this wideranging literature has been attempts to understand the role that political trust performs and the impact of its presence or absence. For example, Devine and colleagues (2020: 2) note the key distinction between trust, mistrust and distrust. They point to the characterisation provided by van der Meer and Zmerli (2017: 1) that trust plays the dual role as the ‘glue that keeps the system together’ and the ‘oil that lubricates the policy machine’, and mistrust or ‘political scepticism’ can underpin engagement and accountability. The key challenge occurs when this mistrust evolves into feelings of distrust towards the political system, threatening disengagement and disorder. A further feature of this literature, and perhaps almost more important given the dominant contemporary narrative, has been the search for mechanisms or processes that can help rebuild or restore trust. It is within this space that the research on civil society outlined within this book was situated, and specifically given the existing literature's primary focus on the national level, whether these themes vary as much within states as between them.

The primary objective of the project outlined in this book was to analyse the dynamics between trust and transparency – the trust–transparency nexus – in a comparative context, examining the extent to which these dynamics may differ as much within states as between them. Although the fieldwork was completed before the COVID-19 pandemic, the nuances of the trust–transparency nexus and the importance of contextual factor highlighted in Enria and colleagues’ (2021) work, also resonated in our fieldwork.

The fieldwork was completed across our six sub-regional cases from 2016 to 2018, below is an anonymised outline organised via our country case studies.

The research project that provides the source for this book is first and foremost a comparative one. According to Swanson (1971: 145), ‘thinking without comparison is unthinkable. And, in the absence of comparison, so is all scientific thought and scientific research’. Ragin (1987: 6) contends that comparison allows identification of the similarities and differences between political phenomena. Furthermore, ‘this knowledge provides the key to understanding, explaining, and interpreting diverse historical outcomes and processes and their significance for current institutional arrangements’. The next three chapters exploring our cases are designed to fulfil the aims identified by Ragin, and the final chapter brings together our findings. This chapter provides the foundations for this comparative analysis. The first section will position the approach adopted in the second half of the book within the context of comparative social research. The second section will begin to introduce our three cases, providing an overview of their wider context. The final section features introductions to the multi-level government contexts within each of the three country cases and specifically the six territorial cases that are the primary focus of our research.

Our comparative approach

The debates around the strengths and weaknesses of the variety of types and forms of comparative analysis are well rehearsed in the academic literature. Peters (2013: 6), for example, argues that despite contrasting approaches to comparative politics that can be found within the academic literature, they all ‘confront a fundamental trade-off between the respective virtues of complexity and generalization’. On the one hand, the single case study enables the exploration of the context and complexities of a single political system but provides limited scope for generalisation. On the other hand, a statistical modelling approach to comparison facilitates robust generalisation, but provides less nuance around the specific political systems encompassed in the study. Ragin (1987) characterises two primary methodological orientations: variables-based and case-based strategies. The former tends to characterise quantitative research, investigating many cases – or adopting a large-N approach – with few variables. In contrast, the latter is associated with qualitative research, focusing on a limited number of cases but witha large number of variables. Peters (2013: 6) notes that these types of approaches tend to be characterised by ‘thick description’ that involves a sophisticated ‘understanding of the social, cultural and economic context of politics’.